The prospect of losing a smidgen of the data hoovered up by law enforcement has worried one police chief enough to effectively 'terror Godwin' the entire conversation, which shows that good is happening with privacy, for a change.

The Australian Greens have announced a set of amendments that would force law-enforcement agencies to obtain warrants for all access requests for stored telecommunications data, and has proposed limiting the data being held to just three months.

​Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has agreed to introduce an amendment to the government's proposed data-retention legislation that will require law-enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant for access to journalists' metadata.

Australia's second-largest telco has joined its biggest rival in confirming the proposed set of data that the government wants telcos to retain for law-enforcement purposes is 'workable' for the company.

Telecommunications companies have argued that the period of mandatory data-retention in Australia should be less than two years, while law-enforcement agencies have indicated that they would like the data retained for as long as possible.

As the Australian government looks to force telcos to retain customer data for law-enforcement investigations, the number of requests for customer data that Telstra is receiving from Australian law-enforcement agencies has risen in the last six months.

A paper from the Parliamentary Library has suggested URLs might be required to be retained under any data retention regime because Telstra has handed over URL history to law enforcement agencies in the past.